LoL community casters take over as LEC records viewership bump

The LEC season has wrapped up with great news on the viewership front, with stats indicating an improvement in major metrics compared to last year—solely due to a sharp uptick in League of Legends fans tuning into co-streamers at the expense of the official broadcast.

Streaming stats site Esports Charts revealed in a report this week that League co-streamers such as Caedrel and Ibai have become a premier force on LEC matchday with thousands tuning in to catch the action. This uptick resulted in an approximate 13 percent boost in total watch hours and higher concurrent averages across the entire split. As a result, however, concurrents on official broadcasts took a dive, with the LEC Twitch channel hardest hit.

Esports Charts states peak concurrents for the official stream were down by over 50 percent despite only a slight drop in the count compared to last year. Over 650,000 fans tuned in to catch G2 complete a gentlemen’s sweep of Fnatic in the LEC Championship this time last year; this year’s final featured the same teams (as grand finals in Europe usually do) and recorded just 606,193, but with many more viewers watching via co-streamers instead of the main channel.

This follows a trend picked up earlier this year, with records at the time indicating Caedrel and Ibai combined accounted for 48.9 percent of the audience during the 2024 Winter Split final between G2 and MAD Lions KOI—which also happened to be the LEC’s most-watched match of the year. Also boosting concurrents was the success of Karmine Corp in the early splits of the year which saw French viewership skyrocket thanks to Kamet0, who filled the same gap Ibai has for his team MAD Lions KOI and the Spanish League community.

Some League fans believe without co-streaming the LEC would be in a whole lot more trouble—especially after Riot’s January layoffs heavily affected the broadcast team in Germany. Without an uptick in content from official sources, many believe the main stream is losing value.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this trend keeps up in the new year, and not just in Europe—the LCS ecosystem shake-up will also mean new opportunities for star League co-streamers to get in on the revamped conference system when it finally arrives.